The Rediscovery of North America, by Barry Lopez (excerpt).

2,620 words University of Kentucky Press: 1990.

A FEW HOURS after midnight on the morning of October twelfth in the

Julian calendar of the West—or October twenty-second, according to the
modern Gregorian Calendar—Juan Rodriguez Bermeo, a lookout aboard the
caravel Pinta, spotted the coast of either San Salvador Island or Samana Cay
in the Bahamas and shouted his exclamation into the darkness. It was the
eighteenth year of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, and these
mariners were their emissaries.

Cristoforo Colombo—or Christopher Dove as it would be in English—

commander of the fleet of three ships, gave orders to take in sail, and to lay
close-hauled five miles off shore awaiting the rise of the sun. The seas were
rolling. Strong winds tore at the crests of the waves. A gibbous moon was setting
in a clear sky.

As they awaited dawn, Columbus let it be known that he had earlier seen a light
on the island, a few hours before midnight. The ships were making about ten
knots when Bermeo cried out. By his claim the commander would had to have
seen the light at a distance of more than thirty miles over the curve of the Earth.
Columbus thereby took for himself the lifetime pension promised the first man to
sight land.

Of Señor Bermeo history has little more to say. It was rumored that he converted
to Islam and died fighting alongside the Moors, who had that year of 1492 lost
their final stronghold in Spain, in the same year Jews were evicted from the
country by royal edict.

We do not know what Columbus and his men envisioned when they came ashore
on Samana Cay or San Salvador, the island the local Arawak people called
Guanahanl, in a chain the Spanish were to call the Lucayas. But we know that in
those first few hours a process began we now call an incursion. In the name of
distant and abstract powers, the Spanish began an appropriation of the place, a
seizure of its people, its elements, whatever could be carried off.

What followed for decades upon this discovery were the acts of criminals:
murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, van dalism, child molestation, acts of cruelty,
torture, and humiliation. Bartolome de las Casas, who arrived in Hispaniola in
1502 and later became a priest, was an eyewitness to what he called "the obdurate
and dreadful temper" of the Spanish, which
"attended [their] unlimited and closefisted avarice," their vicious search for
wealth. One day, in front of Las Casas, the Spanish dismembered, beheaded or
raped three thousand people. "Such inhumanities and barbarisms were
committed in my sight," he says, "as no age can parallel.... " The Spanish cut off
the legs of children who ran from them. They poured people full of boiling soap.
They made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in
half. They loosed dogs that "devoured an Indian like a
hog, at first sight, in less than a moment." They used nursing infants for dog food.
It was "a continuous recreational slaughter," practiced by men who felt slights to
their personages, imagined insults to their religion, or felt thwarted in their
search for gold or sexual congress.

These words of Las Casas's—who said "I resolve silently to pass over, lest I should
terrify the reader with the horror, "a more graphic recounting of these incidents—
were written at Valencia in 1542 at the request of historians, "to display to the
world the enormities, etc., [that] the Spaniards committed in America to their
eternal ignominy" Las Casas writes in the opening pages of this treatise, "I
earnestly beg and desire all men to be persuaded that this summary was not
published upon any private design, sinister ends or affection in favor of or
prejudice of any particular nation; but for the public emolument
and advantage of all true Christians and moral men throughout the world."

I SINGLE OUT these episodes of depravity not so much to indict the Spanish
as to make two points. First, this incursion, this harmful road into the "New
World," quickly became a ruthless, angry search for wealth. It set a tone in the
Americas. The quest for personal possessions was to be, from the outset, a series
of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it-the slaves, the
timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and, later; arable land, coal, oil, and
iron ore-was never visible, in which an end to it had no meaning.

The assumption of an imperial right conferred by God, sanctioned by the state,

and enforced by a militia; the assumption of unquestioned superiority over a
resident people, based not on morality but on race and cultural comparison-or,
let me say it plainly, on ignorance, on a fundamental illiteracy—the assumption
that one is due wealth in North America, reverberates in the journals of people on
the Oregon Trail, in the public speeches of nineteenth-century industrialists, and
in twentieth-century politics. You can hear it today in the rhetoric of timber
barons in my home state of Oregon, standing before the last of the old-growth
forest, irritated that anyone is saying "enough…, it is enough."

What Columbus began, then, what Pizarro and Cortes and Coronado
perpetuated, is not isolated in the past. We see a continuance in the present of
this brutal, avaricious behavior, a profound abuse of the place during the course
of centuries of demand for material wealth. We need only look for verification at
the acid-burned forests of New Hampshire, at the cauterized soils of Iowa, or at
the collapse of the San Joaquin Valley into caverns emptied of their fossil waters.

The second point I wish to make is that this violent corruption needn't define us.
Looking back on the Spanish incursion, we can take the measure of the horror
and assert that we will not be bound by it. We can say, yes, this happened, and we
are ashamed. We repudiate the greed. We recognize and condemn the evil. And
we see how the harm has been perpetuated. But, five hundred years later, we
intend to mean something else in the world.

I MAGINE GUANAHANÍ, where Columbus put ashore that windy Friday

morning. It is the most seaward of the Bahamas. If we mean, specifically, San
Salvador, it is today a quiet, sparsely inhabited island with a small village,
Cockburn Town, and up the road a single hotel visited mostly by divers, who
come here to see an impressive array of tropical fish, of underwater plants and
creatures, and, just offshore, massive walls where the bottom drops off into a
bottomless blue.

The island itself has changed dramatically since Columbus arrived. Its surface, in
essence, was scraped bare and then, in the centuries that followed, it was
repopulated by refugees-people of complex origin, a mixture of local and foreign
plants and animals. The same is true across much of the Caribbean. We cannot
today see what Columbus saw; that fabric of animals and plants and people was
utterly tom apart.

It is hard to conceive how amazed the Spanish must have been in those first few
years by the sight of crocodiles, hummingbirds, and the roseate spoonbill; the
anaconda and the jaguar; rhinoceros beetles and howler monkeys. But these,
ultimately, were only beautiful distractions. The conquistadors would throw away
this splendor in a moment, and did, for the silver of Potosi. Had the Maryland
darter, the dusky seaside sparrow, the Palos Verdes blue butterfly, or the plains
grizzly been able to read, they would have seen their own fate sealed here.

The Spanish sought a narrowly defined wealth. Las Casas writes, "Now the
ultimate end and scope that incited the Spaniards to endeavor the extirpation and
desolation of this people was gold only; that thereby growing opulent in a short
time they might arrive at once at such degrees and dignities as were in no ways
consistent with their persons."

We lost in this manner whole communities of people, plants, and animals,

because a handful of men wanted gold and silver, title to land, the privileges of
aristocracy, slaves, stables of little boys. We lost languages, epistemologies,
books, ceremonies, systems of logic and metaphysics- a long, hideous carnage.

It is perilous, of course, to suggest that we ourselves would have behaved

differently (My generation turns back but a few pages to scenes in the villages of
Vietnam, where our goals were simply political.) I also mean to take the long view
here. But it is not good to forget, not to face squarely, what happened, the way the
world forgot the extermination of Armenians in Turkey twenty-five years before
Buchenwald. And if we say, yes, all right, this was us, and the pattern continues,
then how are we to understand it? How can we clarify for ourselves what went
wrong? How can we claim not that we are different but that we wish, seeing what
has come in the wake of our acts, to set off now in a different direction?
A distinction that is crucial and instructive in the face of this dilemma is
suggested by Tzvetan Todorov, the French writer and critic, in The Conquest of
America. He says that what we see in the New World under the Spanish is an
imposition of will. It is an incursion with no proposals. The Spanish impose, they
do not propose. I think it is possible to view the entire colonial enterprise,
beginning in 1492, in these terms. Instead of an encounter with "the other" in
which we proposed certain ideas, proposals based on
assumptions of equality, respectfully tendered, our encounters were
distinguished
by a stern, relentless imposition of ideas—religious, economic, and social ideas
we
deemed superior if not unimpeachable.

Our trouble with the New World—a world that was intended to refuel an Old
World which had in some sense grown effete—has been that from the beginning
we have imposed, not proposed. We never said to the people or the animals or the
plants or the rivers or the mountains: What do you think of this? We said what
we thought, and bent to our will whatever resisted. I do not suggest lightly, or as
a kind of romance that we might have addressed the animals, the trees, the land
itself. The idea of this kind of courtesy is more ancient than "primitive." And the
wisdom of it the ineffable and subtle intertwining of living organisms on the
Earth, is confirmed today by molecular biology and atmospheric chemistry To
acknowledge the interdependence is simply a good and wise habit of mind.

When we arrived in the New World, we came to talk, not to listen. Now that we
have begun to listen to the land, to take into account in our planning the
biological and chemical responses of a particular landscape, what we are hearing
is the voice that answered Juan Rodriguez Bermeo but which was never heeded.
In the beginning it was an antiphony we wanted no part of. We're anxious now to
know what the land has to say to us, how it responds to our use of it. And we are
curious, too, about indigenous systems of natural philosophy, how our own
Western proposals might be answered by some bit of this local wisdom, an
insight into how to conduct our life here so that it might be richer. And so that
what is left of what we have subjugated might determine its own life.

WHAT WEALTH did Bermeo cry out in anticipation of? Let us be kind, as we
hope historians will be kind to us, and say that for him and for many others on
those three small ships perhaps the hummingbird would have been enough. The
hummingbird,
fresh food after five weeks at sea, and the astonishing lives of the Arawak. But the
record tells us that in the end there was very little imagination here-it was gold,
silver, pearls, slaves, and sexual intercourse. It was venal greed, a failure of
imagination, the reduction of desire to its most banal elements. True wealth-
sanctity, companionship, wisdom, joy, serenity—these things were not to be had
without an offer of heart and soul and time. The Spaniards had no time, and we
find it easy to say on the evidence that they were heartless and immoral. The only
wealth they could imagine was what they took.

The Spanish wanted no communion with America, the place or its people.
Residence, except residence construed as land ownership, was not of interest to
them. America was not to be a home or what a home implied-the responsibilities
and obligations of adult life.
They had left that behind in Europe, had traded it away for lawlessness. If we say
that the elements of true wealth come with the maintenance of a home as I think
is possible, then we have to say that the Spanish and their descendants were not
to find true wealth in America until they discovered the America they had missed.

The true wealth that America offered wealth that could turn exploitation into
residency; greed into harmony; was to come from one thing-the cultivation and
achievement of local knowledge. It was in the pursuit of local knowledge alone
that one could comprehend the notion of a home and its attendant
responsibilities. So the first questions at Guanahani might better have been: Who
are these people? What is this land?
~~
IN SPANISH, la querencia refers to a place on the ground where one feels
secure, a place from which one's strength of character is drawn. It comes from
the verb querer, to desire, but this verb also carries the sense of accepting a
challenge, as in a game.

In Spain, querencia is most often used to describe the spot in a bullring where
a wounded bull goes to gather himself, the place he returns to after his painful
encounters with the picadors and the banderilleros. It is unfortunate that the
word is compromised in this way, for the idea itself is quite beautiful-a place
in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our
deepest beliefs. Ouerencia conveys more than "hearth."And it carries this sense
of being challenged- in the case of a bullfight, by something lethal, which one may
want no part of.

I would like to take this word querencia beyond its ordinary meaning and suggest
that it applies to our challenge in the modern world, that our search for a
querencia is both a response to threat and a desire to find out who we are. And
the discovery of a querencia, I believe, hinges on the perfection of a sense of
place.

A sense of place must include, at the very least, knowledge of what is inviolate
about the relationship between a people and the place they occupy, and certainly,
too, how the destruction of this relationship, or the failure to attend to it, wounds
people. Living in North America and trying to develop a philosophy of place—a
recognition of the spiritual and psychological dimensions of geography—
inevitably brings us back to our beginnings here, to the Spanish incursion. The
Spanish experience was to amass wealth and go home. Those of us who have
stayed, who delight in the litanies of this landscape and who can imagine no
deeper pleasure than the fullness of our residency here, look with horror on the
survival of that imperial framework in North America-the physical destruction of
a local landscape to increase the wealth of people who don't live there, or to
supply materials to buyers in distant places who will never know the destruction
that process leaves behind.